Mark just linked me to a great site about experience economy and design processes. It’s a MUST resource for the many of us, really great and with some thoughtful links an resources too.
I just read an article there about experience economy and creating sense/meaning. It refers to the development of an innovation or an experience concept which involves a process of thinking, doing and reflecting. It states that both parties can certainly work together in this process, and they will book more success through their collaboration than either one could do individually.
Important in this regard are four building blocks that the article find in the work of Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004). They speak of the DART principle:
1. Dialogue
Dialogue means interactivity, being engaged with each other and listening to eachother. Both parties (supplier and customer) intend to accomplish something. It also means that attention is given to the interests of both parties. This requires both a location in which the dialogue can take place and a number of rules with which both parties must comply in order to be able to hold a useful dialogue. The principle of ‘learning by sharing’ holds here: the company learns through the dialogue with the customer and vice versa.
2. Access
The traditional focus
for a company has been the transfer of ownership from the supplier to the customer. The supplier creates a valuable product and, by means of a transaction, the customer gets the product. The customer is increasingly interested in the experience of the product and not in owning it (see Rifkin’s The Age of Access (2000), Chapter One). Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) argue for separating having access to a product or service from owning it. You can achieve reach and access by making information available and by providing instruments that regulate the access to that information. At any given moment while the sailboat you ordered is being built, you can see how far along the builders are and even intervene if you would prefer to have things done differently (www.summersethouseboats.com).
Telebanking offers you a limited access to the bank – that is to say, to your own account. You could imagine that you can gain access to a certain lifestyle. You don’t want to drive just one car of a certain brand, but rather a number of cars, from the most expensive to an MPV that you could drive on rugged terrain.
Access means that being able to get information that is relevant to you, simply and easily. You could easily and readily consult a doctor online or by telephone, for example. This could have a preventative effect: you adapt your behaviour before you become ill or unhealthy.
In India, farmers can show the results of their harvest via web cams and the Internet. Based on the images they show, they can then obtain the proper pesticides and won’t simply have to experiment.
3. Risk assessment
Risk here means the risk that the consumer runs. We have become accustomed to marketing communication only presenting the advantages of products and services. It is not yet common that also the disadvantages are presented in all honesty. But that is something that belongs to the principle of co-creation. Risk assessment is an important theme in co-creation relationships.
Risk assessment also has to do with the risks that the company runs. Lego encountered the following problem. Communities of Lego consumers developed specific software for the operating system of Mind Storm Robotics. As it turned out, their software was better than the one Lego itself had developed. So the key question was, who was ultimately responsible for that product that was developed? And what about the patent? This presents a complicated legal dilemma.
4.Transparency
In the past, companies have profited from the disparity between what the company
knows and what the consumer knows. This disparity has been melting away in recent years like snow in summer. Socially responsible entrepreneurship, openness and transparency are requirements of modern business. There are even symbolic examples of this. Volkswagen built a transparent factory in Dresden, where its Phaeton is manufactured. So-called ‘genius bars’ have been built in the new Apple Stores: the technicians help you to solve your problems; the back office turns into the front office and you can actually see just how the workplace works.
These building blocks must be seen in combination with each other. Value
creation no longer takes place within the company: value is created in the individual.